In my recent post on this week's Illinois elections, I had mentioned that, while I hadn't seen voter turnout numbers for my local community, I expected they would be "paltry". I may have been spectacularly wrong in guessing who would win the Chicago mayor's race, but at least I nailed the adjective for local voter turnout: this Chicago Tribune story states that turnout in my town was 9.46%.
Even if, as I suppose, nobody else who reads this blog cares about voter turnout in a nondescript Chicago suburb, I would nevertheless ask you to just pause and ponder that number for a moment: fewer than one out of every 10 registered voters could be bothered to exercise their prerogative as citizens to choose who will run the town in which we live, as well as the schools to which we all send our children.
In my personal view, it's even more concerning, because in some ways this suburban community is one where civic engagement has seemed to be relatively high: parents are involved in schools, and there are still functioning social and civic organizations like the Rotary Club and the Knights of Columbus. But my outsider's view of those civic organizations is that the membership, on the whole, is aging and graying, with few people even of my generation (I'm 57 years old) interested in joining. As for adults in their 20s and 30s - don't make me laugh (or cry). The same is true of the VFW and the American Legion.
Of course, aging and graying is the trend in local churches, too. It's certainly the trend in our parish. Our October mass counts (mandated by the archdiocese each year for all parishes) indicate that about half the parishioners are attending weekend mass this year as compared to the parish's attendance peak in the early 1990s. And I can see with my own eyes that it's the same slowly aging parishioners in the pews each week whom I met when we joined in 1991. Yet the surrounding community isn't shrinking -and if anything, it's getting younger (and more diverse), not older. The postwar families and Baby Boomers who built up this town are retiring and selling their homes to younger families that can afford to live around here. The local elementary school district is booming: several schools have expanded their classroom space in recent years (and if our district adopts the trend of all-day kindergarten, local schools probably will have to build yet more classrooms). So younger, growing families are moving in but they're not joining churches or other so-called mediating institutions.
Opinion surveys report that, even though very few young adults are members of faith communities, a large majority still describe themselves as spiritual. I confess I'm skeptical about the depth and reality of one's spirituality if it isn't practiced, developed and challenged via regular communal engagement. Being Christian isn't the same as signing a code of conduct once every two or three years; the essence of discipleship is a living relationship with the risen Jesus, and that relationship is cultivated through communal worship and communal service.
It seems to me that we're disengaging, or already are disengaged, on a massive scale, civically and communally. That strikes me as profoundly unhealthy, both for the body politic and the Body of Christ.
Jim, ISTM that local democracy has been hit by a one-two punch from which it is unlikely to recover.
ReplyDeleteThe left jab: When I was a lad, I walked past the mayor's house every day on my way to and from school. He didn't live in a gated community. (He actually lived on a pretty busy corner.) My parents knew, or knew somebody who knew, everybody likely to run for office, through school, the Elks, bowling leagues, etc., etc. If nobody they knew knew him, that told them a lot right there. This was, of course, before Bowling Alone. Oomph!
The right cross was the local newspaper. Ours was more pretentious than what most. It exists mostly on line as a shadow of its former self last time I looked.) In the great media shake-out, those papers were shrunk or folded. The larger newspapers also had to shrink the staff, and the first place the cuts were made was in the suburban or local reporters. The new model does not put a premium on knowing what's going on at ground level. E.g, My old community organization (I've had to go into remission) after a thee-year battle, got the county government and sheriff to agree to recognize locally issued ID cards, which will save drivers who can't get a driver license a trip to jail if they are stopped for a traffic violation. Previously, since the cop couldn't tell who he was ticketing or where they lived, he had to run him in for a couple hundred dollar's worth of checking and overnight stay in jail. The first 300 cards were issued last week, as 1,200 people showed up at a Catholic (I am happy to say) church to apply. Sign-up day was less than two miles, with no turns, from my old newspaper. It still doesn't seem to know anything about this public phenomenon. Umph!
So the bowlers alone are not hearing what they used to hear when they were doing things with other people, and they are not reading it in their local newspaper. So, yeah. A 9.4% turnout for an election is not surprising, given the conditions. Of the other 89.6% more than half probably didn't know there was an election, and most of the rest wouldn't have known any of the candidates.
The incumbents like that. A lot of people who called me up and hoped liberals would rot in hell and their rags would go broke will want to take a bow for that, but deeper tides were flowing.
I live in a town of 1,700 in a rural county, and I know the clowns who run for office. It makes me not want to vote, but keeping out the worst elements is my motivator, I guess.
DeleteTo Tom's point: The latest issue of the Utne Reader has a couple of articles about "news deserts" like my town, where you're going to find out who won the school board election from the guy who runs the party store faster than in the "newspaper," which is basically a shopper run by a local yokel with no skills outside of what she learned in a Dale Carnegie course.
Another piece from Utne was about how one nonprofit is trying to come up with a news bureau for local education reporting in metro areas, a beat that gets short shrift. Young people with social media savvy and journalistic training are coming up with some good solutions, but they won't help fogeys like me who prefer paper.
Highever, I'll be dead in 5-10 years, so I'm not who they should be targeting anyway.
Tom - I'm with you.
DeleteWe do actually have a local newspaper - doesn't just cover our suburb, but the whole cluster of suburbs in this area - on the whole, I'm sure it adds up to a couple of hundred thousand households. They ran a self-laudatory editorial a day or two ago, saying something along the lines of their running 150 pre-election stories covering positions on 1,000+ candidates across all the suburban communities in their circulation area (one problem in Illinois is that there are too many disparate units of government - Illinois leads the country on that particular metric by a country mile). But nobody under the age of 50 reads the newspaper around here, from what I'm able to tell. Younger people are sort of plugged in to what's going on in the wider world, although my personal observation is that the way they get their news is in a way that is highly "colored", i.e. not from objective and responsible reporting as much as politically-driven editorializing, maybe packaged up and delivered to them in a cool social-media way.
Young people, again in my personal observation, are much less plugged into issues in the local community, unless something happens in the local community that ties into those larger political movements, as for example a racially-tinged police shooting. Not that I'm particularly up on local issues, but I do flip through the newspaper every day.
Our neighborhood has a wholly voluntary, non-profit organization dedicated to aging in place. I have mentioned two reading groups I belong to: Non-Fiction and World War I now lurching toward WW2. Each group has about ten members. There are dozens more groups, reading, walking, exercise, writing, ping pong, ...and at the moment a "workshop" for helping doctors to listen to people (has about 12-14 members; don't belong but sounds great from my better half's description).
ReplyDeleteNow I grant you this is a densely populated neighborhood and is especially populated with retirees. And the aging part of aging-in-place does not discriminate on the basis of age!
There must be lessons from these kinds of group to provide info and data on how to get people engaged.
My own theory and experience on the decline of neighborhood and civic engagement is that when women went to work full-time, the most interested persons in schools, neighborhoods, safety, elections, etc. left a vacuum that was not filled by men, stay-at-home moms, adolescents, or people who have time.
Our parish is not particularly growing, but it is not getting smaller either. IMMIGRANTS!!! Nothing like them for filling the pews!
And apropos of Chicago's election: a phone conversation with a friend; told us that even, even the cops in his neighborhood voted for Lightfoot.
"My own theory and experience on the decline of neighborhood and civic engagement is that when women went to work full-time, the most interested persons in schools, neighborhoods, safety, elections, etc. left a vacuum that was not filled by men, stay-at-home moms, adolescents, or people who have time."
DeleteCertainly community seems to be driven by all sorts of things, least of which is geographical proximity.
I don't see older people here fostering community any better than anyone else. People my parent's age (80s/90s) rely on their kids to keep them out of The Home. People my age (60s/70s) are busy babysitting grandchildren (and parents).
I really see a decline in community services and orgs--schools, libraries, hospitals, League of Women Voters, churches, etc.--that used to bring people together for public discussion. Turnout at these functions is generally low even when they do occur.
It's puzzling and a little sad.
"Public discussions", we sometimes have them for school boards, bond issues, local issues like that. They can get pretty heated. Sometimes people get madder about those things than about national politics.
DeleteI developed an allergy for that type of thing by having a mom who was passionate about politics. I did talk her out of running for school board when I was in high school. Later she ran for state legislature, but lost. I wish she would have won, she would have had a ball. But just as well, she wouldn't have lived to finish her term.
Maybe the women who went to work were the ones most likely to be engaged in the community?
DeleteThat was my point..exactly because they hung out locally and often had time to get involved.
DeleteYou can always tell when there's an election around here because a couple of weeks before, signs start sprouting up on lawns like dandelions. That's not high tech but it does get people's attention. Stats for Platte County where I live were that about 27% of registered voters turned out for the last primary in May of 2018. Not great, but not terrible.
ReplyDeleteOne thing everybody I talk to is in agreement about is that we hate the political phone calls, and nobody picks them up. It doesn't matter if you are cell phone only or have a land line, they keep calling (why???).
Katherine - I read somewhere recently (here? Douthat?) that recent elections haven't been persuade-the-persuadable elections; rather, they're turn-out-the-base elections. Phone calls probably are effective for getting the already-persuaded to actually go vote.
DeleteThinking about 2020 - Trump is certain to run a turn-out-the-base campaign. What could he possibly say that would persuade anyone to vote for him who isn't already in his corner?
Trump's already playing a disaster relief game, pitting Midwest flood victims against Puerto Rico's still-suffering hurricane ones. Even though a lot of people in the midwest have suffered greatly, our problems are not the order of magnitude that Puerto Rico's were and are. Democrats in Congress are falling into his game, too. People say he's falling into dementia, but he knows exactly what he's doing. It's what he's best at.
Delete"(one problem in Illinois is that there are too many disparate units of government - Illinois leads the country on that particular metric by a country mile."
ReplyDeleteI'd like to hear from anyone else who has a reaction to Jm's point (at 4:47 when I was on my way to the fish fry). As I indicated, I think we are not likely soon to have enough community to have real democracy at the local level. I could be all wet. Maybe city commissioners will emulate Congress and turn every race into a politico-religious fight that generates a lot of heat and no light. And maybe that will bring the voters back. But I doubt it.
We have a Port Authority run by five elected commissioners. I dare say that even political junkies have only a vague idea of what they do. From endorsing in those elections, I know that the port has two or three big shippers for whose benefit the port is really run, and a lot of smaller entrepreneurs whose livelihood depends on Port Commission decisions. But beyond the users, the court is terra incognita. I've always though the commission would be a great place to make a lot of illegal money and not have anyone care. Apparently it is too obscure for the grifters and grafters to have noticed because the port hasn't had a scandal in ages.
Since it is a specialized job of no widespread interest, port commissioner could just as well be a governor's appointment. But do we want to give governors more appointive power?
The Water Management Board is appointed by the governor. It affects everybody. It can cost taxpayers and farmers a ton when it does dumb things, and it spends tens of millions of federal, state and local dollars. Now-Sen. Rick Scott appointed a complete collection of knuckleheads to the board when he was governor, and the perennial effort to "save the Everglades" was set back by about four years for each year Scott was in office. Scott is a born-again Trump Republican. His replacement is also a born-again Trump Republican, named deSantis, and one of the first things he did was clean out the whole sleeping forest of knuckleheads and replace them with people who something about water. I'd say, if we were voting for one and not the other, we should be voting on water and not on the port. But nobody is going to get into the weeds and seriously think about appointive vs. elective bodies in this day and age. Talk about boring... There are only tons of tax dollars at stake.
Tom, it's possible that the scandal-free run at the port authority is because of the deterioration of news organizations that would have the resources to look into how business is done there.
DeleteAnd you're right - elective vs appointed is both boring and important.
I would be interested in seeing a probably non-existent breakout of non-voters by party affiliation, including so-called Independents. I suspect the Teapublicans had the best turnout of all 3 groups. Even in/for Chicago.
ReplyDeleteHere in the San Francisco Bay Area the Democratic turnout is always high, but only because (I think) that most of those who vote are Democrats and Independents. Republicans in urban California? A dying and hiding breed. That's why I have never decamped to Arizona or even "back home" to Wisconsin.